Selections, translated from Shaykh Ahmad al-‘Alawi’s The Divine Graces and A Treatise on the Invocation, provide the reader with a stunning interpretation of the inner meaning of prayer.
A translation of Fatima al-Yashrutiyya’s auto-biography introduces us, most movingly, to the life of a female Sufi, raised by her father, a great Shaykh in Palestine; and the life within this Shadhiliyya zawiya.
From a post by Ayn Kha on FB:
I recently finished rereading the second part of this remarkable book comprising translations of Sayyida Fatima al-Yashrutiyya’s (d. 1978) writings on Sufism. It includes an autobiography where she recounts in detail the extraordinary life of her father, the Shadhili Shaikh Nur al-Din al-Yashruti. It is hard not to be moved by the love and devotion with which she describes her family, the men and women of her Order, as well as her own deeply inspiring spiritual life, not to mention the tragic, tumultuous political events she witnessed as a Palestinian woman born in 1891 who saw the collapse of the Ottoman empire and endured the loss of her own homeland after WWII.
The autobiographical section in particular is filled with gems that include her meetings with Martin Lings, Titus Burchardt, Seyyed. H. Nasr, and Shaikh Abdul Halim Mahmud (the late rector of Al-Azhar), all of whom she described with great affection and admiration.
I was particularly intrigued by the miracles of her father, which she witnessed first hand and wrote about in her writings. One of them involved bringing a disciple who had died and was being prepared for the burial rites back to life though the invocation of the Name (Allāh) in his ear. In another, he appeared to her and her friend as an apparition in a room of his used for prayer shortly after his death, in a vision both of them saw and could independently verify. Leslie Cadavid should be commended for making such a valuable collections of texts available to an English speaking audience through her excellent translation.
The book will be of particular interest to those who wish to learn more about the place of Sufism in the modern world, feminine embodiments of Islamic spirituality, the Shadhili practice of the invocation of the Name, and more generally, the twentieth-century history of the Middle East.